Tag Archives: John Kerry

I’m not sure how it’s news that a bar owner in Chicago has hung a painting of a nude Sarah Palin on his wall, but the apparently immense interest is certainly worthy of comment: Please!

I mean, really. Where to start?

How is it acceptable to feminists that Obama supporters – such as the bar’s owner who painted the portrait – seem to spend an inordinate amount of time imagining the potential vice president of the United States naked?

How is it acceptable that these same folks would never imagine, say, Hillary Clinton naked?

Is it acceptable to demean a woman seeking a powerful office because she is attractive?

Is it acceptable to make fun of an updo that is actually designed – by her Palin’s own explanation – to unsexify her so she’ll be taken seriously?

Isn’t it creepy that the artist used his daughter as the portrait’s model?

Do liberal men secretly find it perversely sexy that Palin is a hunter – thus putting an automatic rifle in her hand in the portrait?

Why is hunting such a big issue to the Palinphobes – do they want to ban hunting? Coming from what he described as a hunting state, Howard Dean used to brag that he had an “A” rating from the NRA. John Kerry went hunting during the 2004 campaign, didn’t he?

Which brings us back to the original question: How does this constitute news?

Democratic talking heads – as well as party leaders such as John Kerry – were all over television on Tuesday pointing to the failed bailout vote in the House as evidence that John McCain didn’t even have enough clout within his own ranks to deliver on legislation, much less the ability to lead a nation.

I’m not sure Dems will want to go down that road, because by that measure, Barack Obama wasn’t even able to deliver his own state.

Four of 11 House Democrats from Illinois voted against the bill – including fellow South Siders Jesse Jackson Jr. and Bobby Rush.

Jackson, in fact, is a close friend of Obama’s and a national campaign co-chairman. Yet he was one of the more forceful speakers against the bill.

“This bill is simply a band aid not a cure for the financial crisis, and it does little for the hard-working Americans who will pay for it,” Jackson said in a statement. “It does not go far enough in addressing the systemic and terminal problems of our financial system. It further privatizes profits and socializes the losses.”

Rush, who supports Obama but clearly still has a distaste for the man who not only once challenged him for his House seat but whom he saw as a snooty opportunist in the state senate, said in a statement that the bailout bill was “a $700 billion financial earmark for Wall Street.”

TIM: “This year’s election is one of the most critical in our history.”

Has any politician ever said otherwise? “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time for some straight talk: this election won’t make any difference. I’m not even voting, and I’m running for president!” Maybe during that string of pre-Lincoln nobodies in the mid-19th C. (Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan).

STEVE: What’s funny is the election that didn’t figure to be “critical” turned out to be the most critical of all: 2000. Everything today flows from that one.

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TIM: [Re: Daschle] “I recently was fortunate to meet with Pres. Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan. He couldn’t pay his staff’s salaries. He couldn’t even pay to keep the lights on. No, he didn’t have much money. He barely had enough to survive. But when he came out on stage and he was ready to play, people came alive.”

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TIM: “Chain of Fools:” Inspired choice, but I think I heard the original. “Five” (vs. “for eight long years / I thought you were my man”).

The Internet has been around a long time now – long enough to threaten the survival of many newspapers, including the Sun-Times – and yet, the traditional media still largely has a cornpoke view toward the dangfangled technology. And these are the people begging for your trust and patronage?

By that title, you’d think this would be a piece appreciating the use of the Web to combat scurrilous smears – a tool not available to, say, those smeared by Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s; or to poor Edmund Muskie in 1968, who, like Hillary Clinton, never really cried; or to Nixon’s enemies in the 1970s and Michael Dukakis in the 1988 campaign and so on.

But no. This, instead, is another tired rant against the Internet. Let’s take a closer look at the complete lack of rational thinking emanating from the geniuses at the Sun-Times.

“For several weeks, a scurrilous rumor about Michelle Obama has wafted through the blogosphere with an awful stench.”

Maybe the Sun-Times ought to rail against the radiosphere and TVsphere.

“But you didn’t hear about it in this newspaper for the best of reasons: Not a shred of evidence said it was true.”

The Sun-Times no problem publishing a Christopher Hitchens column a few months ago, though, stating as fact that Bill Clinton was a rapist. (And where is the S-T’s outrage at WTTW for allowing a local author to state that Bill Clinton “is dating” on Chicago Tonight recently without proof?)

Barack Obama is moving the Democratic National Committee to Chicago and essentially absorbing it into his campaign, Politico reports.

Could that give the GOP more ammunition to attack Obama for his Machine ties?

Well, consider:

“The move to Obama’s headquarters puts the Windy City squarely at the center of American politics for the first time since it was the scene of a Democratic Party meltdown at the 1968 convention,” Politico says. “Then and now, it’s a city whose central political feature– top-down machine control – is one legacy Obama has taken from his allies in the reigning Daley family.”

In a strategic sense, it seems like a smart move, though not everyone is happy about it.

“Barack Obama’s move to merge key elements of the Democratic National Committee into his own campaign’s Chicago headquarters appears aimed at the goal of a centralized and united Democratic Party.

“The shift of the DNC’s political and field organizing operations to Chicago will consolidate the Democratic presidential campaign apparatus more than in either of the last two cycles, when staffers at DNC headquarters overlapped – and occasionally competed – with aides to Al Gore and John Kerry . . . it also left no doubt about where the new center of power lies: On the 11th floor of an undistinguished office tower on Michigan Avenue.”

A bigger irony, though, is that there apparently is one state not cooperating in the strategy: Illinois.

Why?

Because the chairman of the Illinois Democratic Party is Michael Madigan, and as we all know, his agenda is his own.

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On the other hand, with Obama taking closer control of the DNC than John Kerry did, his campaign – despite its rhetoric – may reel in Dean’s 50-state strategy and make sure resources go where they want them to go. After all, Obama is Dean on the outside and Emanuel on the inside.